Donna Leon - Blood from a stone

‘Not the tie-pins, though. They have different coloured jewels in them, don’t they?’ Brunetti asked.

‘One would hardly notice, they’re so small,’ she said. ‘I wonder if I should get him some.’

Brunetti had no idea if she meant ties or jewelled pins for them: it hardly mattered. ‘And put them down as office expenses?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ she answered. ‘Perhaps I’d list them as “maintenance”.’ Then, turning to business, she asked, ‘What is it I can help you with, Commissario?’

Hearing her, Brunetti wondered when she had last asked anyone what she could do for them, whether himself or the Vice-Questore. ‘I’d like you to see what you can find out about the vu cumprà ,’ he said.

‘It’s all in here,’ she answered, pointing at her computer. ‘Or in the Interpol files.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘not that sort of information. I want to know what people know, really know, about them: where they live and how they live, what sort of people they are.’

‘Most are from Senegal, I believe,’ she said.

‘Yes, I know. But I want to know if they’re from the same place and if they know one another or are related to one another.’

‘And,’ she continued, ‘presumably, you’d also like to know who the murdered man is.’

‘Of course,’ he answered. ‘But I don’t think that’s going to be an easy thing to find out. No one has called about him. The only people who volunteered anything were some American tourists who were there at the time, and all they saw was a very tall man with hairy hands who they said looked “Mediterranean”, by which they mean dark. There was another man, but all they noticed about him was that he was shorter than the other. Aside from that, the shooting might as well have taken place in another city, for all we know. Or on another planet.’

After a thoughtful pause, she asked, ‘That’s pretty much where they live, isn’t it?’

‘Excuse me?’ he asked, confused.

‘They don’t have any contact with us, not real contact, that is,’ she began. ‘They appear like mushrooms, set out their sheets, and do business until they disappear again. It’s as if they popped out of their space capsules, then vanished again.’

‘That’s hardly another planet,’ he said.

‘But it is, sir. We don’t talk to them, or really see them.’ She noticed how he responded to this and so insisted, ‘No, I’m not trying to attack us for the way we treat them nor trying to defend them, the way my friends do, saying they’re all victims of this or that. I simply think it’s very strange that they can live among us and yet, for the entire time they aren’t on the street, selling things, remain invisible.’ She looked to see if he realized how serious she was, then added, ‘That’s why I say they live on a different planet. The only attention we pay to them on this planet, it seems, is when we arrest them.’

He considered this and had to agree with her. He remembered once, last year, an evening when he and Paola were on their way to dinner and had been caught in a sudden rainstorm, how the streets had instantly blossomed with Tamils, all carrying bouquets of collapsible umbrellas, which they tried to sell for five Euros apiece. Paola had remarked that they seemed — the Tamils — freeze dried: all one had to do was add water, and they sprang to full size. Much the same, he realized, could be said of the vu cumprà : they had the same ability to appear as though out of nowhere and then as easily disappear.

He decided to accept her point and said, ‘Then that’s a way to begin: see if you can find out where it is they go when they disappear.’

‘You mean who rents to them and where?’

‘Yes. Gravini said there are some who live down in Castello near his mother. Ask him for her address or have a look in the phone book: it can’t be a very common name.’ He recalled what Gravini had said about the tenuous nature of his relationship — one could hardly call it friendship, not if it originated in one man arresting the other — with Muhammad. ‘All I want is the address. I don’t want to do anything until Gravini has had a chance to talk to the one he knows. See what you can find out about any other apartments that might be rented to them.’

‘You think there’d be contracts?’ she asked. ‘There would be copies at the Comune.’

Brunetti doubted the willingness of most landlords to offer the protection of a formal contract to Africans: they were certainly reluctant enough to give them to Venetians. Once a tenant had a contract, the law made eviction difficult, if not virtually impossible. Besides, a formal contract had to state the rent, and thus the income became visible, and taxable: any sane landlord would want to avoid that. So the Africans were probably renting — Brunetti found no way around the obvious pun — in nero .

‘I think it would be better to ask around,’ he answered. ‘Try the people at the Gazzettino and La Nuova . They might know something. They always do a story every time we do a round-up and arrest some of them. They’ve got to know something.’

His attention wandered and he found himself wondering how Elettra endured wearing the turban. The office was warm, one of those offices on the side of the building where the radiators worked, so surely it must have become uncomfortable to wear it tight to her head all day long. But he said nothing, thinking that perhaps Paola would be able to explain.

‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ she said. ‘Are there fingerprints I could send to Lyon?’

‘I haven’t got the autopsy report yet,’ Brunetti said. ‘I’ll send the photos to you as soon as I get them.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

On his way back to his own office, Brunetti was already running through the list of friends who might be able to help him with information. By the time he reached his desk, he had accepted the fact that there was no one he knew who could supply him with reliable information about the ambulanti , which led him to suspect that Signorina Elettra was right and they did indeed live on different planets.

He called down to the office of Rubini, the inspector in charge of the Sisyphean labour of arresting the ambulanti , and asked him to come up for a moment.

‘About last night?’ Rubini asked over the phone.

‘Yes. You hear anything?’

‘No,’ Rubini answered. ‘But I didn’t expect to.’ There was a pause, and then he asked, ‘Should I bring my files?’

‘Please.’

‘I hope you’ve got a long time, Guido.’

‘Why?’

‘There must be two metres of them.’

‘Then should I come down there?’

‘No, I’ll just bring the summaries of the ones I’ve submitted. It will still take you the rest of the morning to read them.’ Brunetti thought he heard Rubini laugh quietly but wasn’t sure. He replaced the phone.

When Rubini showed up more than ten minutes later, a stack of files in his hands, he explained that the delay was caused by his having searched for the file containing all of the photos that had been taken of the Africans who had been arrested in the last year. ‘We’re supposed to photograph them every time we arrest them,’ he explained.

‘Supposed to?’ Brunetti asked.

Rubini set a large stack of papers on Brunetti’s desk and sat down. From Murano, Rubini had been on the force for more than two decades and, like Vianello, had moved up through the ranks slowly, perhaps blocked by the same refusal to curry favour with the men in power. Tall and so thin as to seem emaciated, Rubini was in fact a passionate rower and every year was among the first ten to cross the finish line of the Vogalonga.